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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I have never had a cavity, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned from the TV show, LOST.
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What I Learned Yesterday:
I just published episode 48 of We Have To Go Back Podcast which is the LOST podcast I do with my wife. We love LOST. We love LOST so much that when we found out last fall that a get together was being planned in Honolulu for the 10th anniversary of the LOST premiere, we immediately started making plans to attend the event.
This is a big deal for us for several reasons. We’ve never traveled anywhere together for a fan gathering before. Yes, I’ve gone to several comic-cons, but Kari has never had any interest in those. Kari doesn’t really like to travel. We’re taking the kids along with us on the trip. This is a big deal because we’ve never taken a family vacation before. We never took a family vacation when I was a kid, so this will be my first family vacation ever.
We’ll also be extending our stay so that we can take our time and really enjoy the island and time together. We’ve reserved a condo that’s on the 35th floor and has an unobstructed view of Diamondhead and beautiful views of the ocean. As you can imagine, there are cheaper vacations that we could take, but none of them will include the LOST experience.
I’ve said it before, although not on this podcast, that LOST change my life. I know that sounds dramatic, but it did. In fact, it’s safe to say that without LOST, you would not be listening to this podcast today. Despite what you may think, I really don’t watch a lot of TV. At any given time there are 2, maybe 3 shows that I watch per week. If I’m podcasting about it, of course, I’m watching it. Right now I’m watching LOST via Bluray, Alias via Netflix, and Falling Skies live each week on TNT.
That’s the way it’s always been for us. We may talk about TV a lot, but that does not mean that we watch a lot of it. Before LOST came along, TV was not really important. We watched it, of course, but casually. I can’t even tell you a single show we watched before it with any regularity. And then we saw the previews for LOST. It looked really good. I mean, really, really good. So we made it a point to make sure we were in front of the TV, tuned to ABC at 7pm central on Wednesday, September 22, 2004. Except for the day our son was born, October 13, 2004, we never missed watching an episode live.
At first the show blew us away with the epic scope that it brought. The plane crash scenes, the crazy ways that many of the crash survivors’ lives had intersected without them realizing it, the crazy monster thing that was in the jungle, and the mysterious hatch. As the show progressed into seasons 2 and 3, it did something that was genius. Well, it did many genius things from day 1, but the thing I’m talking about today is that it revealed its true identity: it was a sci-fi show.
As strange as it may seem now, prior to LOST, I did not like science fiction. Star Wars was pretty much the lone exception. I liked comic books, action/adventure, mystery, comedy, and horror. Had I known from the beginning that LOST was a sci-fi show, I would have never tuned in on September 22, 2004.
Once LOST revealed itself to be a sci-fi show, it was obvious to see that it had been a sci-fi show from the very beginning. The writers and producers had done such a good job of putting the character stories, drama, and mystery first, that myself, and many others, had no idea that we were awakening our inner sci-fi fan.
After I realized that I like sci-fi, I began to look at things differently. I realized that there were many other film projects that I liked that were also sci-fi. I realized that sci-fi isn’t always space ships and ray guns. For example, the action filled Terminator franchise? Science fiction. Back to the Future? Science Fiction. Jurassic Park? Science Fiction. Did I really grow up loving sci-fi and not realize it? Yup. Even more overtly sci-fi films like Ghostbusters, The Fly, and Robocop had somehow not seemed like sci-fi to me because they took place on earth and didn’t involve space ships.
Once I realized that I liked sci-fi, I began to take a closer look at other sci-fi stuff that DID involve space ships and ray guns. You know what I discovered? I. LOVE. SCI-FI.
Here’s what I learned.
Well, I learned that I love sci-fi, of course, but I also learned that I need to be more open minded. I didn’t like sci-fi because of the stigma that was associated with it. I didn’t want to be one of those geeky, awkward, glasses wearing, not-jocks who got made fun of or didn’t fit in with the popular kids. Let me think…yep, I totally failed at that effort.
Is this a principle that can be applied in other areas of our lives? You bet it is. Do we miss out on things that we would REALLY enjoy simply because we’re too afraid to try it? That fear could be because of peer pressure like it was for me, it could be the fear of trying something new or the unknown, it could be some other type of fear. The point is, it’s important to try new things. We may just find ourselves hopping on an airplane bound for a tropical island and family vacation of our dreams.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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